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Monthly Archives: October 2011

My Daskeyboard arrived today, and I pretty much just ripped open the box and plugged it in. I guess I was too impatient to check the packaging, and was more interested to experience the keyboard for myself.

For a while now, I’ve been thinking of getting a mechanical keyboard, mostly because I remember the good old days of the IBM keyboards, and how satisfying they were to type on.

A few keyboards caught my eye, namely the Ducky, the Razor Black Widow, and ofc the Das. I decided to pull out all stops and just go for the Das.

The Das takes a bit of time getting used to compared to a traditional membrane keyboard. One thing you’ll notice right away is the accuracy of the keys. Way more accurate. Every time you press a key it fires, unlike with a membrane which is hit and miss.

For a while now I haven’t been happy with membrane keyboards. They look great, especially the last few Logitech ones I’ve had, but looks aside they’re rubbish.

I’m a programmer more than a gamer, and I rely heavily on keyboard input sometimes for more than 8 hours a day. So these are my thoughts on the Das. I hope you find this informal review useful.

1. It is a great keyboard, but don’t expect the silent model to be silent. You won’t wake the neighbours but it definitely is not whisper quiet. I have to be quite honest, the silent model pushes the limit to what I would consider acceptable noise coming from the keyboard. But the silent model does get the balance right – this is due to the Cherry Brown MX switches. While cherry might not have audible feedback in the switch, you’ll definately get enough audible feedback from plastic on plastic as you suppress all the way down.

2. I guess the big question is should you take a professional over an ultimate. The difference being that the professional has labelled keys. This really depends on if you’re already a touch typist. If you are, then don’t worry about it. I found that within 5 minutes of using it, I could match my previous typing speed on my Logitech Desktop Wave. 99% of the time you don’t really need to look at your hands anyways. There are those moments when you need to press a special character which might be a bit strange, and sometimes its hard to guess gaps for example on certain numbers such as 5 or 6, but definitely the whole thing feels natural and easy to use.

If you’re not a touch typist, then just get a regular professional keyboard with labels. No point in having a keyboard like this for bragging rights unless you’re completely confident with how to use it.

3. The feel. The keyboard feels a little too plastic for my liking. They’ve gone with hard plastic, I guess for durability. It does feel solid, but it also feels a little smaller than I expected, I guess because my previous keyboard was so big. However not a train smash, and I am sure I will adjust. Excuse this rather subjective point of view, you might really like the stuff I dislike.

4. Usage is amazing, keys are really responsive and I haven’t worked on something this agile since an old IBM electric typewriter. There is no way your typing speed will be the same with a mechanical keyboard, this I am pretty sure of. I expect my typing accuracy to improve considerably, I’m anticipating a 10-20 wpm increase as I continue to use it. Within just a few hours of actual use I can already see an improvement. This isn’t a DAS thing, this is just the nature of mechanical keyboards.

5. No multimedia controls – really bad, you might think you won’t miss them, but it is nice to at least have volume up/down on your keyboard. typically when you use a computer your hands are on your keyboard, so it is annoying having to reach for a mouse and fiddle around on the screen when you want to change the volume – Bad! Future DAS Keyboards need to fix this.

6. Having a USB hub on the side (2 ports) – Very nice idea and this is an excellent place to plug in your wireless mouse receiver. Right there next to your mouse – no more mouse lag!

7. The piano black? A lot of people prefer matt finishings, but I have to say the piano black really works on the DAS. Pretty happy with that.

Overall its a top quality product I would recommend, but if I was the designer I would include a wrist wrest and some multimedia options. The overall ergonomics is acceptable though, and I really love how the keys fire every time.